According to one of the senior engineers at Twitter, the microblogging site is getting ready to roll out a major update to the search and discovery of its popular platform on Saturday, July 7. Pankaj Gupta, an engineering manager who heads up the personalization and recommender system group at Twitter, posted a teasing tweet saying the impact will be huge.
"Search & discovery in @twitter set to change forever after tmrw. Team - congrats and enjoy the enormity of ur impact few understand today!" reads Gupta's (@Pankaj) tweet on Friday, July 6.
According to Twitter's most recent user data from March, the six-year-old microblogging service has more than 140 million active users, and its traffic adds up to more than 340 million tweets per day, i.e. more than 1 billion in just three days.
Search and discovery are two of the most essential aspects of the service, and Twitter has seen its popularity soar to tremendous dimensions recently. The microblogging service is used regularly by all sorts of Internet users, from political figures to businessman, from the average citizen to movie starts and so on. However, Twitter has not yet managed to find the perfect approach to deliver a fully engaging and personal discovery experience for its users.
All Things D recently indicated that the increasing rivalry and overlap between social aggregation app Flipboard and Twitter might urge founder Mike McCue to step down from Twitter's board. Based on this assertion, Business Insider further suggested that Twitter is pursuing a new direction to better compete with Flipboard.
Twitter's last major effort when it comes to discovery was late last year, when it introduced the "Discovery" tab. This move aimed to help users find and curate content on the service more easily, in a manner similar to Flipboard's. A new effort in this direction seems long overdue, but Saturday's announcement may be the change the service needs. Twitter has already made a series of intriguing, though subtle changes last month. Those changes include increased support for multimedia content in Twitter's integration with Facebook, as well as removing hashbangs, thus speeding up the loading time by up to five times. Twitter also recently pulled its tweets from LinkedIn, in a move aiming to keep users more engaged on its platform.
